Off Topic: A Sad Note About PC Games

[dumbluck]

Heh. That's what mommys and daddys are for.

[Richard]

Actually I already made that point .

And that is why console games tend to swerve more to the arcade, that and the fact that the current controls for console don't work well with hard core games. I once tried Railroad Tycoon II for the Playstation and it was painful, well not as bas PzG for the Playstation .

[Saxon]

The demographics of the market are different than many people think. First of all, computer games are not just for kids any more. People my age (31) grew up with games and still love them. We also now have the cash to buy them, which was more than I can say for when I was young. Second, we have moved well beyond Pac-Man and it has become respectable to play. The Sims, Flight Simulator, the Tycoon games and Everquest have seriously changed the way society looks at games. PC Gamer ran an article on older gamers and it was filled with people over 50 who spend a lot of time on computers. A repeated comment was that Quake was a bit too fast for them, but these other, more thoughtful games were right up their alley. This market is only going to grow.

Also, the place of games in our lives has changed. This web link http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/ent...00/1752522.stm
Goes to an article stating that people in the UK now spend more money on games than on renting movies. Admittedly, they also say that consoles are where the action is, but it points to a real change in the role computers and computer games, in one form or another, play in our lives.

Grommet has a point, buying console is cheaper than getting a computer just for games. However, the number of households which already have a computer for other reasons is quite high. Adding a game to the existing computer is relatively cheap. Until consoles have full web surfing capabilities, folks who want to use the Internet and send email at home have to get a computer. For them, getting a console instead just adding games to their Internet machine doesn’t make sense. I could be wrong, but I think this is a big market. How to get the money in that market to the people who create the games is the key to ensuring good games keep coming.

Richard, where do the development teams get the cash to pay their staff? If only 1% of games in retail return money to the developer, how did the games ever get put together in the first place? I don’t know the business, but it seems to me that no matter how much you love a game, you are not going to be working long on it if you have no pay cheque. You mention development costs in the millions, and lots of the games look it, yet you say the developers don’t see any money. I have a feeling I am missing something.

Tigga, I think you have made up my mind on how I will play my Empire. You had best hope you don’t fall to us, your furry people will be cleaning our sewers with their toothbrushes while my Discipline Lords read motivational speeches over a megaphone. And get back to work, damn it!

[Richard]

Some developers get funding from a publisher, which sounds nice. When Tim did 101 Empire funded the actual development and then promised royalties afterwords. The problem is that unless your game is a huge seller you will never see royalties. So now you are are begging for the publisher or another publisher to fund you, the problem is in most cases the original publisher owns your game rights. So in many cases if you want to continue to make money the publisher gets to dictate your game to you, in which case they are looking to make money so they dumb down your game to make it more appealing to the mass market. Thus you start making games you don't like to make or you are out of business.

Don't get me wrong there are success stories, but for everyone that is a success I can show you many others where companies just don't exist anymore. This is very true in the hardcore gaming areas. Wargames and sims suffered first. How many hardcore wargames or sims do you see coming out of major publishing houses today? Not many. Remember SSI, Microprose, Interactive Magic, Janes, Origin, etc. All of these are gone or are now a joke Version of themselves.

Eventually it is going to hit other areas, in fact it has started to hit the rpg market with a few notable exceptions. I also fear that MOOIII is not going to make the money it needs to impress the publisher and thus we won't see new 4X games coming out of publishers for awhile. Now maybe Quicksilver has kept costs low, if so that might save them.

But my basic point is that without having to sell your soul to a publisher who can then dictate when your game comes out no matter how buggy it is, and will probably want to dumb it down to appeal to a lot of folks, there are very few options for the niche markets anymore. And let's face it Space based 4X games are a niche today. When a game could sell 100,000 copies and be a big success that might have not been true, but today it is the sad truth.

[Saxon]

Richard,

Ok, now I am starting to get it. Basically the publishers are using developers as disposable grunt labour. Pay them by the hour and then keep the profits from the work and ideas, particularly when there is a big success. It sounds a bit like the recording industry, where the artists do the hard part and the companies only do PR and distribution of the product, but somehow manage to hold on to most of the cash. We also get lots of bad music targeted at focus Groups and demographics rather than people.

I now have a much better idea where you are coming from and see your points. Still, niche market or not, you have been involved in some great products and I hope that you can make it keep happening.

[TerranC]

quote:

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Originally posted by Richard:
... Wargames and sims suffered first. How many hardcore wargames or sims do you see coming out of major publishing houses today?... ...Remember SSI, Microprose, Interactive Magic, Janes, Origin, etc...

And let's face it Space based 4X games are a niche today.

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Oh boy... Those were the days.
The scariest fact is SSI. they released Reach for the stars about 2 years ago and look at them now.

Yeesh.

[Richard]

Actually even the RTFS remake was done by SSG, not SSI, and it was released from the remnants of SSI (most of the SSI folks had long been laid off) that was owned by Mattel Interactive at the time.

And RTFS is a PERFECT example of what I am talking about. It was a game where they tried to please everyone and pleased no one. They tried to remake a game that was a darling of the hard core 4X crowd, but dumbed it down a great deal. And they tried to make a game that the general public would like, but many of that audience didn't care for it.

Don't get me wrong the game has good qualities but there were a lot of folks that were disappointed by the overall quality of the remake. It surprised me too because I am a big SSG fan. In my mind you should always try to please you core audience with a game like this, and hopefully if you do a good enough job you will win converts from the casual gamers out there.

As far as SSI goes I was a huge SSI freak, my wife said I should buy stock in them . If it had SSI on the box I used to buy it without thinking as I knew I was going to get a game I would love. Those were the days .

[disabled]

Personally, I don't like consoles much these days. Most of the games just suck. I play Final Fantasy and Test Drive Series on the sony, but beyond that most consoles controls seem sluggish and awkard to me plus game play is short most of the time.

Now....
Last night I spent a good 7 hours playing Space Empires I, 2 and so on. Why? It was fun.

As for Space Empires IV, I sincerly hope that it doesn't use RTG graphics like most games do. I hate the blocky and stretched texture look more RTG games have on this ships and graphics. MM shouldn't go down that industry standard...

[Phoenix-D]

RTG?

Phoenix-D

[capnq]

RTG = Real Time Graphics, a computer graphics (animation?) standard.

I don't understand Hadrian's comment, though, since SE IV's graphics are based on .bmp formats. Did you mean some hypothetical future sequel?